Re-Victimization

Often when I’m doing seminars, I’ll be approached by people who will tell me that not only have they been mugged, assaulted or abducted (usually attempted abductions) but that this has happened to them on multiple occasions; some will actually refer to themselves as having a “mark on their back”, which makes them stand out. In this blog post I want to look at why re-victimization occurs.

For a predator to assault you, they must first engage in three actions: target selection, surveillance and synchronization of movement - surveillance may occur during synchronization of movement, and continue during a verbal interview that may precede the assault. Basically what this means, is that an assailant must identify you, possibly picking you out from other potential victims, and in some form approach you (tracking you from behind, intercepting you etc.). Whilst all this is occurring they will be looking for cues that you are someone who will capitulate to their demands, and/or not fight back. These will largely be non-verbal cues, but they may also study how you interact with others in your environment to see the degree with which you avoid possible confrontations with people e.g. do you move out of the way for other people even when it’s your “right of way” etc.

People who have been assaulted before have a tendency to project more of these “cues” than they would have done before an assault. Some of this is quite natural e.g. if somebody assaulted you because you bumped into them when not looking where you were going, you will naturally be more jumpy when in a crowd and do more to avoid other people’s movement than you might have done before. Having been the victim of an assault, you will see the opportunities for people to assault you a little more readily than someone who has never been the targeted before. Our fear system is very quickly educated, and having been assaulted before it may trigger a little faster than it necessarily should i.e. it will see potential warning signals, earlier than before, even if those warning signals could lead to non-aggressive behaviors and actions. Your responses to these may stand out to a predator scanning for potential victims.

Trauma will also affect the way you behave and act. There are many definitions of what trauma is but the one I’ve found most practical for the purposes of understanding violence is that of being exposed to a highly emotional and stressful situation over which you had no, or perceived you had no control. If you were picked “randomly” – assume you were in the wrong place at the wrong time – off the street, abducted, beaten and possibly sexually abused by a group of armed assailants you will have experienced an incident that was extremely emotionally stressful, and one in which you had no control over. One of the first emotions you will experience after the event is shame – that this happened to you. As social creatures we do not want to admit to others we were unable to control what happened to us; we are ashamed. However clear cut it was that the incident was not your fault and however evident it was that there was nothing you could do you will feel judged. Shame is perhaps the worst emotion for us to experience and for our mental health we will do whatever mental acrobatics we have to do to avoid experiencing it – this is where we start to play with the issue of control.

Rather than experiencing shame we would rather have our guilt be personal and not social, therefore we start to blame ourselves for being assaulted. By blaming ourselves we start to take back some control of what has happened to us e.g. it was something we did or a way we behaved that makes us responsible for the assault we experienced. We may even extend, develop and expand this so that we see the assault as being our fault – we may also come to the conclusion that we deserved to be assaulted. Adopting these beliefs will affect us emotionally, and cause us to act and behave in ways that we wouldn’t before the assault. We may conduct ourselves in a more subservient and compliant manner allowing people to treat us badly without calling them on it. We may hold ourselves differently and give off a sense of non-confidence in our movement patterns.

All of these things may mean that we appear far more quickly than we did before on a predator’s radar. This is why the issue of control in an assault, even if it involves compliance is so important. If as a survival strategy you hand over your wallet to a mugger, you will suffer less trauma because you exerted control over the situation, than if you did because you didn’t know what to do or felt you hadn’t a choice. Self-defense and reality based training needs to consider the post-conflict phase of violence as well as the conflict phase and design its solutions to take these into account.